The emergence of the so-called 'Rising Powers' - including but not limited to China, India, Brazil and Russia - represents one of the key drivers of global economic and social change. The Rising Powers and Interdependent Futures network funded by the Economic and Social Research Council includes 12 research projects at ten universities across the UK that explore these ongoing changes.

Nadvi said: “Our paper has been looking at how our
changing labour regulations are impacting on labour standards in China.
The paper that we presented is an introduction to a special issue of the
International Labour Review which is on this theme coming out in December 2014.

What we are trying to look at is how does the rise in the labour
regulation that we have seen in China in recent years impact on
questions around labour standards working around labour conditions and
labour rights.

I think things are changing and what we are beginning to see in those
changes is that increasingly there is an improvement in real wages.
There has been a lot of labour activism and in fact grass roots activism
with wild cat strikes and so on, and one of the consequences of that is
that there has been a rise in real wages in much of the region along
the coastal belt and pearl-river delta and the province of Guangdong.
But the nature of the labour regime in China and the working conditions
in China is varied and so if you move further inland to inner provinces
you might still see very poor conditions and very harsh working
environments.

We need to do more analysis of ways in which national, regional and
local levels of government engage with this agenda. Looking at labour
regulations and the law that has been passed is not going to be enough
we need to see how they get implemented and what our evidence is
pointing to is that the nature of that implementation varies at the
local level. There are reasons why those variations take place.

When you look at the BRICS, Brazil is the most interesting it is a
fascinating story of the ways in which regulation around law, around
finance, around labour standards, have really moved ahead. Brazil is
interesting and is almost an outlier. China falls somewhere in the
middle and Russia is at the other extreme, where we don’t see very
strong legal institutions beginning to take effect and so therefore we
see all sorts of issues around corruption.”